Dream Architecture: New Views

Part 3 of the Dream Geographies collaboration between poet Judith Serin and artist Masami Inoue.

My husband–an unfamiliar dream husband—has bought us a large white stucco house. At first I think it’s dull. But outside along a wall of round dark stones I discover a path to a beach. There’s hardly any sand—perhaps the tide is high—and people are swimming along with Magellan penguins like the ones at the San Francisco Zoo. The house sits on a large green lawn, bigger than usual for the city. I worry I might miss my actual studio, recently built on top of our garage. In the dream it’s across the bay in Berkeley. Well, I can have a house in both places now. Inside, climbing a spiral staircase, I look out a window to a thrilling view of a mountain. It’s Corona Heights, where Herbert lived when I met him, but taller, with more bare rock on top: part of my vertiginous dream San Francisco, mixed with the mountains of New Hampshire, where my family vacationed when I was a child, and those of Hawaii, which I visited as an adult. I see another mountain in the next window. Now I have both mountains and water. I call to tell my husband how excited I am and start a walk north toward one of the mountains.

—

Judith Serin is the author of the poetry collection Hiding in the World, and her work has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including The Ohio Journal, Writer’s Forum, Nebraska Review, Colorado State Review, Proposing on the Brooklyn Bridge, and When Last on the Mountain. She presents these pieces with gratitude to Betsy Davids.

Masami Inoue, who also works under the name Masa, is a Japanese-American artist who has lived on both coasts of the United States. Most recently she has been studying and working in the Bay Area, where she and Serin began their collaboration. She creates both digitally and traditionally, focusing on watercolor as her medium.

About the Series

Judith Serin is a dreamer—a very vivid dreamer—and when we at Broad Street read her work, it sparked a lively conversation. We’re a nonfiction magazine, but who’s to say that dreams, with their jumble of memories and images and things we’ve never seen, aren’t a kind of reality in a world for which we don’t yet have a map?

To say the least, we were intrigued, and we had to think of a way to bring the debate to our readers. What follows is the first installment of what will be a weekly series called Dream Geographies, a collaboration between Serin and artist Masami Inoue. The two came from different backgrounds to meet at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco’s Bay Area, and the project reflects some of their shared landscape.

So here, in anticipation of our print issue “Maps & Legends” (available in May 2016), is “Dream Architecture: New Views,” by Judith Serin and Masami Inoue. See “Map of Dreams” and “Dream of San Francisco” on our website. Further pieces will appear each Thursday this month.